ART VIEW; The Messy Saga of 'Tilted Arc' Is Far From Over

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''Tilted Arc'' is gone. After eight years, Richard Serra's 120-foot-long and 12-foot-high bend of Cor-Ten steel - better known by the press as the rusted steel wall bisecting Federal Plaza - has been disassembled in the dead of night and carted off to a yard in Brooklyn, where its three parts lie stacked and packaged behind barbed wire. ''Good Riddance'' was the headline of the editorial in The Wall Street Journal. The world is finally safe from the evil thing. Whew!

Everything, it seems, is fine. The work is protected. ''The main thing is that we are taking good care of it; it is being treated with respect,'' said William J. Diamond, the regional administrator of the United States General Services Administration and chairman of the 1985 open hearing on the work who selected and served on the panel that weighed the evidence and recommended that ''Tilted Arc'' be relocated. According to Mr. Diamond, the plaza will now be ''opened up'' and restored to the original architect's ''work of art.'' There will be performances and concerts. The plaza will even be rededicated. At last the stain of ''Tilted Arc'' will be removed.

Ah, that it were so simple. ''Tilted Arc'' would not be one of the most bitterly contested of all 20th-century sculptures and a watershed work of public art if it would just go poof. There are wounds here that will not easily heal.

The public is not likely to forget having had no say in the existence of a huge, dominating sculpture that no one in and around Federal Plaza could escape. The art world is not likely to forget the metaphors of dirt and decay that continue to inform the Government and press response to a major American artist's work. Serra is not likely to forget the promise that his sculpture would be permanent, which led him to make the most ambitious and absolute work he could.

Where do we go from here? With the tremendous caution that is now built into the procedures and with public suspicion about artists and artists' suspicion about Government, can the G.S.A.'s Art-in-Architecture program, which commissioned the work, continue to foster the freedom of expression that the Government wishes to showcase? Can public art be independent, analytical and fully ambitious and yet accepted within its community? How much real diversity within Government-commissioned art is now possible?

The messy saga of ''Tilted Arc'' produced a neat predicament. For Mr. Diamond, removing the Serra has ''saved'' the program. ''Tilted Arc,'' he said, had become an example used by those who thought the Government should not spend so much money on art. Like other officials of the G.S.A., he believes that if ''Tilted Arc'' had remained, the Art-in-Architecture program would have had no future.

But for those who believe that the 1985 panel - three of the five members were G.S.A. employees and all the appointments were made by Mr. Diamond, whose prior resistance to the work was well known - was a case of the end justifying the means, it is removing the sculpture that has compromised the future of the program. No less unsettling is the 1988 decision of the United States Court of Appeals that Serra was not even ''constitutionally entitled to a hearing before the sculpture could be removed.'' The court ruled that ''Tilted Arc'' belonged to the Government and the Government could do what it wanted with the work. Does this mean the Government can destroy the art in its corridors and offices?

After ''Tilted Arc,'' the approach to public art and to the role of the artist's personality cannot be the same. ''Tilted Arc'' was insistent and imperious; so was Serra. Both public art and the artists who make it are now expected to be more digestible. Dale M. Lanzone, the director of Arts and Historic Preservation at the G.S.A., said recently, ''If there is something this country has to offer that is unique, it is our endorsement of the creative act.'' But how much artistic freedom is now possible in a Government setting?

Since the venomous debate over ''Tilted Arc'' began, almost immediately after its installation in 1981, public art has changed. Serra's ambition was grand. He wanted a sculpture that the body could trust, and he wanted a sculpture that provoked relentless consciousness of the streets, office buildings and courts around it. He wanted his steel gesture, with its sharp, sweeping movement, to be at the same time analytical and mythical, protective and subversive. He wanted a sculpture that would be equal, not subservient, to the architecture around it.

While ''Tilted Arc'' has been experienced from the beginning as primarily aggressive and hectoring and only later (if at all) protective and reassuring, most public art that wants to preserve a critical distance from its environment now tends to be the opposite: its appearance is reassuring and its subversiveness disguised. This is the strategy of an artist like Jenny Holzer, whose verbal provocations on plaques, signs and benches are often presented in a seductive, reticent or fretting tone.

After ''Tilted Arc,'' the idea of permanent public art that both protects and subverts has largely disappeared. The Sculpture Project in Munster, West Germany, in the summer of 1987 - an international exhibition of around 60 artists, including Holzer, Dennis Adams, Dan Graham and Michael Asher - suggested the large number of artists investigating ways in which art can expose social conflicts. While Serra, who participated in the show, uses heavy steel that seems threateningly balanced, the other artists tend to prefer lighter materials like wood, glass and aluminum and to conceive of public art as a temporary intervention.

When public art is permanent, it is now likely to be far less confrontational than ''Tilted Arc,'' which no one in Federal Plaza could be unaware of even for a second. Battery Park City, the new architectural complex in lower Manhattan, has been widely presented as the model for effective public art. Artists and architects have been working in collaboration. The first two projects completed, Ned Smythe's ''Upper Room'' (in 1987) and Mary Miss's ''south cove'' (last summer), are above all places to be in and enjoy - spaces of peace and quiet by the Hudson River. The works establish dialogues with the history of the site and the history of art and architecture, but these dialogues are discreet enough that no one has to listen. This public art makes Battery Park City seem substantial, responsive and human. As a result, the art promotes those developing and selling the site. Serra is after a public art that will entirely depend upon its site without promoting it.

What is the future of the Art-in-Architecture program of the General Services Administration, which can set aside for art up to one half of 1 percent of the estimated construction costs of a Government building? (The Government paid $175,000 for ''Tilted Arc'' and about $50,000 to have it removed.) More than 250 works of art have been commissioned by the G.S.A. throughout the country since the inception of the program in 1963. (Because of inflationary construction costs, the program was suspended between 1966 and 1972. Federal Plaza was built in 1968.) The G.S.A. now seems to be leaning toward upbeat, nonconfrontational art. In 1985, after reviewing the recommendations of Mr. Diamond's panel and reconsidering the entire history of ''Tilted Arc,'' Dwight Ink, the acting administrator of the G.S.A., used the words ''enhance,'' ''enrich'' and ''embellish'' to describe the effect Government-commissioned art should have on its environment. This is not the sort of language that would encourage the G.S.A. to take risks.

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Since 1985, the program has changed its procedures. Any artist commissioned by the G.S.A. is now going to be involved with the architect from the beginning.

Now the community will have its say in any Government work - although the G.S.A. has not defined ''the community,'' and it is not yet clear what community involvement means. Judging from the eight G.S.A. works just dedicated in the new Social Security headquarters in Jamaica, Queens, involving the community means inviting elected officials, business people, artistic leaders and concerned citizens to voice their opinions when the artists present their plans.

These changes are understandable and perhaps inevitable, but they are no panacea. They will lead to art that is generally acceptable to the people who have to live with it, and some of this art is bound to be substantial. But how ambitious and independent art can be that has to make everyone comfortable is another question.

It is impossible to consider the future of the Art-in-Architecture program without considering Serra himself. At the 1985 hearing, many artistic leaders, including William Rubin, then the director of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, and Robert T. Buck, director of the Brooklyn Museum, testified in favor of ''Tilted Arc.''

Many art professionals continue to believe that the process by which the sculpture was removed was wrong. But few were willing to carry on the fight. This has something to do with the personality of an artist whose abrasiveness reinforced the resistance to the work and therefore played a role in the decision to remove it.

Serra will be 50 years old later this year. He came of age as an artist during the 1960's, and he has the hard, driven manner that is characteristic of other 60's sculptors, including Donald Judd and Carl Andre. Once Serra sets his mind on something, he is as inflexible as his lines of steel, and he all but obliges others to deal with him on his own terms.

Part of the problem can be approached through his art. The steel, the weight, the bladelike edge and the chest-thumping convexity of ''Tilted Arc'' are aggressive. The intrusive, impersonal side of the work is so conspicuous that many people not only experience the work as a personal attack but also believe this attack is all the work is.

The emphasis on this side has been encouraged by Serra himself. He discusses his art in terms of a critical relationship between art and its environment. The only kind of writing about his art that he seems to sanction is theoretical and political. There is little warmth in Serra's words, and he offered almost no sympathetic identification with the office workers and administrators who had to live with his installation. For the general public, Serra has not been reassuring.

While the convexity of ''Tilted Arc'' forced an awareness of the aggressive public side of New York City, however, the concave side offered a place of refuge: within its curve, the bustling city hardly seemed to exist. If the public could not appreciate a private, romantic side that has far more to do with the haunted dreams of Albert Pinkham Ryder than with political theory, it is partly because Serra is determined to conceal it in his personality and art.

If he had acted differently, the saga might have been different. What would have happened if Serra had discussed his work in ways that played up the romantic side and played down his distance? He might have created a different climate for his work. People might not have liked ''Tilted Arc,'' but they probably would have made more of an effort, and the resistance might not have been so extreme.

The onus is now on the G.S.A., but it is also on artists. It is unclear how much will the Government has to commission risky art and to give artists some power over the fate of their work. It is also unclear whether our best artists will now seek out site-specific commissions after the Government has removed a work that could only function as intended within the site for which it was made. But the responsibility is not the Government's alone. To those myriad artists who either feel superior to the public or who cannot help giving the impression that they feel superior, please leave your applications home.

A version of this article appears in print on April 2, 1989, on Page 2002033 of the National edition with the headline: ART VIEW; The Messy Saga of 'Tilted Arc' Is Far From Over. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe